Universal Cartographics
26 Aug 2019Prochaska
At the beginning of April 3303, Roger Montgomery forwarded a job advertisement from his employer to Zoe. The UC office on Bluford Orbital in LHS 3447 was looking for a second pilot with a university degree. Zoe sent an application to Ms. Reedings, the head of the office, and was hired for testing. Her duties were mainly logistical, while Commander Montgomery was doing the more remote research assignments. One of her recurring tasks was to transport a 14-man team led by Sophie Montgomery. She had not yet met Roger's sister in person, but only knew that she had trained at the FSS like her brother Roger.
Most of her assignments were purely routine transport assignments and did not require any of the skills she had learned during her studies. Something out of the ordinary was an assignment in the following May when she was to find a crashed Nav Beacon on LHS 3447 A 2. The satellite had last been located 150 clicks north of La Cosa Base with a motion vector heading 315, and her job was to find the crash site and read out any data still available on the device. A few days after receiving the mission she flew her Asp Explorer to the described location and began the search. After a long flight over the deserted planet she found the crash site, but there she was attacked by two S5LM skimmers. The appearance of the two guard drones completely surprised Zoe, and after the long flight the shock caused panic and she instinctively accelerated away from danger. When she regained her composure, she realized that she had lost all orientation, and finding the crash site again ultimately took longer than the original tracking. Since she was expecting the drones this time, she landed near the crash site and switched to her SRV, which she used to destroy the skimmers and finally completed her mission.
Zoe had her first personal meeting with Reedings at the end of her probationary period. Reedings seemed very distant and incredibly disciplined on Zoe. Her way intimidated Zoe, she couldn't help thinking what Reedings would think of her if she knew of Zoe's chaotic past. It seemed inconceivable to her that such a rigidly appearing woman would understand her. What would Reedings have thought if she had met Zoe 10 years earlier, she wondered. Standing here before her was a little scary; was Reedings just pretending, not showing her sentiments? What did she know of her past? These thoughts made Zoe very insecure.
But Reedings also had another surprise in store: "Commander Prochaska, as you might have already guessed, this bureau is no ordinary subsidiary of UC. Our team here is Unit 77 of the OSA, which is the Office of Strategic Affairs. Our organization was originally founded in the 2850s alongside INRA. The original mission of the service was to protect the INRA from sabotage and espionage, and after the INRA units were disbanded the mission was adapted, and since then we have been protecting all of humanity from external and internal threats. OSA teams exist within the control of all three superpowers. Our task is to record and analyse the respective threat situation, after which we pass on our findings to the locally responsible security forces. The existence of OSA is known only to the highest levels of government.
Unit 77 was reactivated when in 3301 an encrypted Dataslate was found on a moon in the Antal system containing a SimSense reproduction of the events surrounding the Prism system. The type and quality of the recording was far beyond any known technical means. Furthermore, when the file was transferred to the memory of a Lakon Spaceways Python, we found that it was designed to turn any system to which it was transferred into a playback device. The result of the operation was a python-shaped lump of metal floating in space..."
In fact, Zoe’s doubts about her new employer had been minor prior to this meeting, but in hindsight, she thought that she should have guessed that Roger had not possibly been involved in a simple civilian business endeavour. She remembered that even his old enterprise, the Utopia Deep Space, had been backed by the FIA, or whoever exactly.